WHO Afro
Marketplace

It is known that a well-developed innovation ecosystem provides the much needed impetus for development and scaling of sustainable innovations. The opportunities that have been unlocked by innovations is unmatched especially in the health sector. Empirical evidence has shown that locally generated innovations accelerate better health outcomes, reduce inequities, and have huge scope for prevention and care by harnessing the rapid growth in information and mobile technology in the African continent.

However, many innovations in Africa face a huge bottleneck that hinder them from transition to scale because many countries lack innovation-friendly policies and enabling environments to support establishment of a robust innovation ecosystem. This is despite the incredible efforts by local innovators to contribute to the healthcare system. In order to complement efforts by the African innovators, the WHO in the African region (WHO AFRO) has stepped in and developed a virtual marketplace that seeks to connect different international and local players in the innovation ecosystem to identify and support innovative ideas emerging from the African continent

The major aim of the Innovation marketplace is to identify promising health innovations, delineate critical path and work with different stakeholders including funders and governments to help bring these innovations to scale.
WHO AFRO is, therefore, calling for all stakeholders interested in being part of this virtual innovation ecosystem to be plugged in this marketplace platform. The call is particularly directed towards health innovators, funders (philanthropy, private sectors or venture capital firms), researchers, universities, incubators, accelerators, civil society, NGOs, international organizations and different sectors of government including health.